"I've long wished to compile an album to celebrate Christmas-time as it's a part of
the year I've always loved. Not just the religious festival and the season of goodwill,
but the pagan winter solstice which marks the darkest time of the year, and heralds the
coming renewal of the earth as the days grow longer again.
There are "holy" songs I've always wanted to record; Silent Night, Swing Lo,
Sweet Chariot, and Amazing Grace, which are now featured here, as well as
the traditional American fireside ballad Copper Kettle, and also hymns that I've
written which I re-recorded for this collection, My Redeemer and Shine
Brightly, as I wanted them to stand alone more.
The rest of the material is a mix of instrumental and vocal tracks that I've written for
previous albums, but which come together here to form a whole, which I hope eypresses the
warmth, the hope, the longing, the love and the celebration I feel inside.
There is sometimes sorrow and melancholy in my music, and winter can be a sad and
hibernatory season, but behind all of that I hope I have expressed the spirit of renewal
which I feel so keenly as a constant inside my being, and which I feel so keenly as a
constant inside my being, and which I see around me all the time despite what may become
lost to us in the passage of a life.
That spirit of renewal is behind all the religious and ethnic Thanksgiving festivals the
world over in mid-winter, including, of course, our Christmas time". [Asher Quinn
(formerly Asha)]